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I never gave much thought to the Menendez brothers; they were merely part of the cultural tapestry of the 1990s American media feeding frenzy, and I was 11 years old during their highly publicized 1993 televised trial.

This was pre “reality” TV, with real lives lost and real lives being condemned, yet it just bled into the nonstop background noise of the salacious news cycle along with O.J. Simpson, Amy Fisher, Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, and the like.

Every hour on every channel there was someone famous from scandal talking or crying into a courtroom microphone; it was desensitizing.

Unlike the aforementioned defendants, the Menendez brothers have morphed into serial killers in the collective mind, pictures of their mug shots in anthologies that feature the likes of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Richard Ramirez.

The very moniker “The Menendez Brothers” inspiring a sense of primal dread.

There is a lot of renewed interest in these reluctant tabloid celebrities of my preteen days, not only because many of those courtroom dramas are being revisited through various modern-day lens’ by documentary films, television mini series, and TikTok reels, but because, due in part to one such series, new evidence has come to light regarding the Menendez Brothers case.

For my part, I am refusing to watch any fictionalized accounts or even most documentaries about the Menendez brothers and have chosen to stick to content that allows the men to speak for themselves through courtroom testimonies or interviews, and to read and research the case and the statements of the family and other eye witnesses as well as the brothers themselves, with discernment and experience.

When the trial was televised, the brothers were depicted as two entitled men who brutally slaughtered their parents in cold blood one night for no reason in particular other than to acquire their inheritance early.

That was the tabloid spin and the prosecutor’s ammunition.

And then there was the graphic trauma porn that is making the rounds again, horrific details of alleged sexual abuse that the media loves to take out of context, highlight, and loop for no other reason that I can see other than to indulge the perverse vicarious fascination and horror of audiences who have depersonalized the human beings whose lives are at stake.

It’s textbook exploitation and yet for some, highly entertaining.

The fact is, the Menendez brothers—who were both sentenced to life without parole—currently have a shot at another hearing. Unlike the trial that led to their sentencing, it will not omit as “inadmissible” supporting evidence and the only testimony of alleged sexual assault that matters, those of the people who were actually there: the alleged victims and the eyewitnesses, as well as alleged newfound physical evidence being thoroughly taken into consideration (not another Hollywood producer’s glorified retelling).

As I revisit this story and the infamous moniker and images that have become embedded in our collective consciousness, I, too, am seeing and hearing it, in many ways for the first time, but nonetheless through an evolved lens, one of a sexual assault survivor who pressed charges and testified against someone close to me, was ostracized by my community, was scrutinized mercilessly in court when I was not, in fact, the one on trial, and became the subject of unrelenting victim blaming. This was in 2023, not 1993.

I hope the brothers see their new day in court, and I hope that society has learned something, anything, about rape culture and PTSD and trauma bonding and victim blaming since 1993.

Why society doesn’t want to believe survivors and wants to portray victims as perpetrators is reflective of deep, ancestral wounding and psychological conditioning that wants to point fingers rather than look into the mirror and hold ourselves collectively accountable.

The fact that I did not unload a shotgun into my perpetrator doesn’t mean that I, and I suspect many other sexual assault survivors out there, don’t relate to everything else the brothers recounted in their testimonies on a visceral level.

The terror, the confusion, the desperation. Check, check, check.

You can’t present evidence, even overwhelming evidence, of alleged sexual assault to a jury of your peers and expect your peers to implicitly understand the seemingly irrational behaviors that result from prolonged alleged sexual assault and the psychological abuse and intimidation that has to accompany it in order to silence victims and keep them in a state of learned helplessness without those peers either being survivors themselves who have actively done the work to heal or professional scholars on the subject.

The effects of abuse are complex, and the longer it persists, into adulthood, as in the alleged case of Erik Menendez who was allegedly trying yet forbidden to escape prior to the double homicide, the more internalized those damaging effects become.

The brothers went on a shopping spree after the fact, while their parents’ killers were still unknown to law enforcement. They were photographed ringside at a New York Knicks game in a now collectible basketball card, evidence that these men just wanted to live the good life at their parents’ expense, claimed the prosecution.

Let’s not forget these men were rich to begin with.

They were already living the good life (at least on the superficial material level the prosecution emphasized) at their parents’ expense. Lyle was attending Princeton, the family had a mansion in Beverly Hills; no doubt if they would’ve stayed silent locked in a golden cage of fear, and Erik would’ve continued to be his father’s alleged victim, anything he could’ve wanted for would’ve been at his disposal. It appears that all he truly wanted was his freedom, and now he is just in a different kind of prison.

I don’t support killing your parents, or anyone else for that matter. The Menendez brothers themselves haven’t said anything on the record that I can find to reflect that they are proud of or even at peace with the slayings they did nor has either of their recounting of events from 1993 onward given the slightest indication that either of them had the presence of mind to premeditate anything that fateful night aside from self-defense.

Defending oneself against one’s alleged abuser the only way someone really can when they are allegedly subjected to prolonged, life-threatening abuse—in a spontaneous and disorganized manner—is a long way away from the calculated sadism of Ted Bundy, the pathological violence of Richard Ramirez, or even the documented domestic abuse that Nicole Brown Simpson allegedly suffered repeatedly at the hands of none other than O.J. Simpson.

This was a one-off episode that offed two people who allegedly conspired to violate not only their own two sons bodies’ since childhood but at least one known other person who has recently come forward with allegations.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” is a question nobody should be asking any abuse victim ever again in this day and age.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” is the insulting, invalidating question people everywhere are still being asked when they come forward with allegations of abuse.

Well I don’t know…

Maybe they didn’t want to wait years to testify just so their alleged abuser could walk free and possibly kill them and likely abuse many others, like I did.

“Why was her skirt so short?”

“Why were you drinking in a bar with men you didn’t know?”

“You asked for it.”

Is the implication alleged victims are still knocked over the head with when they do muster the courage to speak out, if they are believed at all, which is why so many never do and never will, and male on male sexual assault is even less represented in media and less sympathetic due to toxic masculinity culture.

It is undeniable. And the Menendez brothers have been the victims of a three ring circus of a public lynching whether or not they are denied the truth of their testimonies that they were on the heels of a lifetime of shame and fear.

Going back to the spending spree. I did a lot of bizarre stuff following my sexual assault. I even visited my abuser in prison and gave him money.

I engaged in high risk behavior.

I self-medicated with compulsions.

I was, one could say, having an epic meltdown because I had endured extensive sexual violence, and I was in a society that had few and far between support systems in place for me and little to no community awareness on the issue as a whole in spite of how incomprehensibly commonplace it is.

According to The Sexual Assault Victims Advocacy Center Inc. an American is sexually assaulted every 73 seconds.

According to The National Library Of Medicine circa 2010:

“Of the 136 cases of sexual assault reported over the 10-year period, 8 (5.9%) are coded as false allegations. These results, taken in the context of an examination of previous research, indicate that the prevalence of false allegations is between 2% and 10%.”

That doesn’t mean that false allegations don’t happen; they do and are extremely harmful.

It’s just that, well, sexual assault happens a lot more.

And if someone tells you they were sexually assaulted, they are statistically likely to be telling the truth.

And these reports don’t account for the majority of victims who never file official reports because the legal system sides with perpetrators as does society as a whole; the #MeToo movement was a valiant beginning but ultimately a drop in the bucket. Many high profile, alleged perpetrators were released on technicalities, or there was not enough evidence to arrest them in the first place, and they continue to have thriving careers and social lives while their victims are scapegoated for disclosing the atrocities that were inflicted upon them without their consent.

Here we are folks, in 2024, and here we were in 1993.

Sexual Assault is far more common than false reporting and even more common than parracide.

“Parricide is a rare type of murder that accounts for about 2% of all homicides.”

What’s more common?

Parental sexual abuse:

“Boys were victimised in one-fifth of cases, with multiple children abused in some cases. The victim’s biological father (58%) or stepfather (41%) were most likely to be the offender. However, the victim’s biological mother was involved in 28% of cases, most often as a co-offender.”

When I was 11, catching inescapable glimpses of the Menendez brothers on TV, in their suits and with the poise that comes from attending Princeton Day School and playing tennis, along with the circular narrative of their money-hungry malevolence, I’d assumed they were…grown ups. Compared to me, they were, but I mean, I assumed they were fully formed adults in command of all of their mental faculties.

They were 18 and 21.

18 and 21.

Moment of silence while that sinks in.

They were babies.

Erik had just finished high school.

Our frontal lobe isn’t even fully developed until we are 25 years old.

I have a 20-year-old son and a 22-year-old son.

When I think of them trying to process what I couldn’t process in my early 30s, the complex trauma of sexual assault, what took me five years of intense professional help as well testifying against my abuser and a trauma-informed support system to feel like I was finally free physically as well as psychologically, it’s too inconceivable to hold in any rational light for long.

My sons say “bro” and “bet” and say “cooooooool!” when they see my new tattoo shop on FaceTime and use emergency bypass to wake me up at 2:30 a.m. because they want to borrow money for McDonald’s.

When you are being preyed on, your sympathetic nervous system is activated into fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode. It’s primal, kill or be killed.

If you can’t flee and your hand is forced and you fight back, your higher functioning capacities go offline.

This is the exact opposite of premeditated murder.

I’m not saying they should’ve shot their abuser; I know I didn’t, and a lot of survivors don’t, but let us never forget that there are also countless victims who never get the chance to become survivors, and those of us who did had to fight tooth and nail for it every last step of the way.

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